Short Abstract

The panel asks how experiential knowledge reshapes mental health across polarised contexts. How can such knowledge gain authority within mental health services, academia and social movements? How is it negotiated, co-opted, or resisted? How can it foster collectivity or deepen divides?

Long Abstract

Since the 1950s, survivor/user movements have mobilised lived experience to expose injustice and objectification, co-produce new forms of care, and redefine what counts as valid knowledge alongside – and often against – biomedical psychiatry. Today, experiential knowledge has gained new visibility across the mental health field, taking diverse forms: as refusal and pride within mad movements; as peer support in community mental health; and as a “voice” and “evidence” within research and policy arenas; as a form of epistemic resistance and counter-hegemonic practices; and as negotiation with biomedical logics of diagnosis in clinical settings.

However, the inclusion of lived experience within institutional settings can be fragile. Participation is flattened to tidy recovery narratives, roles become tokenised or precarious, and concepts forged through struggle are translated into individualising, market-friendly idioms of resilience, wellness, and self-management, as biomedical metrics privilege standardised “progress” over situated accounts.

Nevertheless, the lived experience fosters the coexistence of positions that do not agree on ends or methods yet recognise themselves as fighting together against epistemic injustice, harmful practices, and extractive forms of care.

Polarisation, in this context, doesn't involve clear belligerent sides, but professional realignments, coalitions and new tensions between forms of evidence. How can lived experience drive change across services, academia, and social movements, and what is our role within that process?

We invite papers that follow and/or embody experiential knowledge across disparate positions and infrastructures, such as Mad Pride spaces, peer-led services, clinical systems, legal and policy arenas, media and digital platforms, and faith-based or community settings. Methods may include collaborative and multi-sited ethnography, survivor-led, arts-based and participatory action research, as well as practice-based reflections from peer work and community mental health.

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